The English poet Adrian Mitchell once wrote that "the earth is falling to pieces, but some of the pieces taste good", a viewpoint that the Austin based singer-songwriter Riana Rose would doubtless empathise with. This line certainly ties in with the wide-eyed 'life can be beautiful' thrust of this album's opening track - 'Are you in love with the world?' - where she recommends optimism in the face of adversity.
It's followed by 'Desire', where a flood of enigmatic images collide with clunkers ( "..laughing the way God laughs at war") and embarassingly twee rhetorical questions : "What have we done, children of the unknowing?"
On the equally breathless 'King's Flashlight',love and life are quirkily compared with being stuck on a ferris wheel, where you can't move "but you're flying".
There are some equally dodgy similies in 'Blind Cyrus', where her lovesick mood makes her a dry forest to her man's blow torch and features cheesy lines like: "I want to lay my body down in the sweet nectar of your embrace".
The album features mandolin, cello and fiddles but despite these folky touches it has more of an Indie Pop feel. Although her voice is too sweet to rock out convincingly, when she sings with more urgency and passion, as she does on the best track, 'The River', she shows she's no wallflower.
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On this track, the twin courses of the river and childhood make for striking metaphors in her plea for certainly in a world out of balance.
Too often though, Rose has a tendency to weigh songs down with an excess of wordy imagery and a bit of self editing would have made the tunes punchier and more memorable. Instead, in songs like 'Misaligned Tires', the extended 'life is a road' theme ("love is like a mountain - you can't drive around it - you can't drive through") gets quite forced after 6 minutes.
If enthusiasm and abundance was enough to make for great songs then Raina Rose would be onto a winner with this, her third, solo record. But, although this is a sincere and warm-hearted collection of moody ballads and upbeat tunes, she doesn't seem too sure whether to go for goofy charm or edgy intensity and mostly the songs fall in a musical no-man’s land between the two.
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